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Evolution of programming languages

Programming languages evolve over time. They get new language features and their standard library is extended. Sounds great, doesn’t it? We all know not going forward means your go backward.

But I observe very different approaches looking at several programming ecosystems we are using.

Featuritis

Java and especially C# added more and more “me too” features release after release making relatively lean languages quite complex multi-paradigm languages. They started object oriented and added generics, functional programming features and declarative programming (LINQ in C#) and different UI toolkits (AWT, Swing, JavaFx in Java; Winforms, WPF in C#) to the mix.

Often the new language features add their own set of quirks because they are an afterthought and not carefully enough designed.

For me, this lack of focus makes said language less attractive than more current approaches like Kotlin or Go.

In addition, deprecation often has no effect (see Java) where 20 year old code and style still works which increases the burden further . While it is great from a business perspektive in that your effort to maintain compatibility is low it does not help your code base. Different styles and old ways of doing something tend to remain forever.

Revolution

In Grails (I know, it is not a programming language, but I has its own ecosystem) we see more of a revolution. The core concept as a full stack framework stays the same but significant components are changed quite rapidly. We have seen many changes in technology like jetty to tomcat, ivy to maven, selenium-rc to geb, gant to gradle and the list goes on.

This causes many, sometimes subtle, changes in behaviour that are a real pain when maintaining larger applications over many years.

Framework updates are often a time-consuming hassle but if you can afford it your code base benefits and will eventually become cleaner.

Clean(er) evolution

I really like the evolution in C++. It was relatively slow – many will argue too slow – in the past but it has picked up pace in the last few years. The goal is clearly stated and only features that support it make it in:

Make C++ a better language for systems programming and library building

Make C++ easier to teach and learn

Zero-Cost abstractions

better Tool-support

If you cannot make it zero-cost your chances are slim to get your feature in…

C at its core did not change much at all and remained focused on its merits. The upgrades mostly contained convenience features like line comments, additional data type definitions and multithreading.

Honest evolution – breaking backwards compatibility

In Python we have something I would call “honest evolution”. Python 3 introduced some breaking changes with the goal of a cleaner and more consistent language. Python 2 and 3 are incompatible so the distinction in the version number is fair. I like this approach of moving forward as it clearly communicates what is happening and gets rid of the sins in the past.

The downside is that many systems still come with both, a Python 2 and a Python 3 interpreter and accompanying libraries. Fortunately there are some options and tools for your code to mitigate some of the incompatibilities, like the __future__ module and python-six.

At some point in the future (expected in 2020) there will only support for Python 3. So start making the switch.